User talk:188.123.106.105

Could you please explain to me why you are depunctuating definitions? --Æ&Œ (talk) 21:06, 24 December 2013 (UTC)

Two reasons: because that's not how lists are formatted in english. It should start with lowercase letter and end with no punctuation (it is not a sentence!); because consistency: majority of translations already adhere to this style.

I might agree that they are technically not sentences, but many brief responses (interjections) contain some punctuation, and they may not be classifiable as sentences. You might be able to find printed dictionaries that punctuate their definitions even though they are technically not sentences.
Unlike other editors here, I don’t believe that uniformity is some sacred duty that must be accepted without question. I’ve seen some formerly common practices eliminated from the project, which implies that they were not always good ideas. That is not to say that we should immediately reform entries just because we don’t agree with the layout, but we should propose opposing ideas, and persuade the frequenters why they are superior to the current ones. If you fail to convince somebody, you will still learn something about their views. --Æ&Œ (talk) 02:42, 25 December 2013 (UTC)

Uniformity is absolutely critical for any machine-processing of wiktionary data. It is in fact the greatest shame that wiktionary is not at all enforced to some common standard, it makes any programatic access to the data really really difficult. A free and open resource of this size in a time and age when everything is moving towards "service" architectures, with a "database" format that is completely inconsistent is completely ridiculous. I've myself written an emacs package to get translations from wiktionary and the bulk of the code is dealing with 10 or so different ways italian translations are formatted. If you want to propose a discussion somewhere, feel free to do so, but I don't see any reasonable objection. Also, printed dictionaries rarely (=never) print the items as lists. 188.123.106.105 21:11, 25 December 2013 (UTC)

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